Americans fed up with the bullshit they've been fed for many years. They want the truth.

Flynn: This is where I think the world has misread Donald Trump. He has no intention to step away without examining all relationships that we have. His intent is to relook at the way we are organized globally, where the US is sort of expected to be a global leader, but relook at these alliances and these charters that we are under to make sure that they are still viable for the 21st century. It doesn’t mean that President Trump comes into office and NATO goes away. But I would say that NATO as a political alliance does need to be relooked at in terms of everything — resourcing, capabilities.

Throughout the Sanders campaign, the Socialist Equality Party has welcomed the broad shift to the left that it revealed in the thinking of millions of working people and youth, while warning that the Vermont senator would inevitably disappoint his supporters.

Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign Tuesday, not with a bang but a whimper. The Vermont senator formally endorsed his rival in an undignified prostration before the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street’s favored presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The unity rally featuring Sanders and Clinton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, had all the spontaneity and enthusiasm of a going-out-of-business sale. The funereal atmosphere was perhaps fitting

The Never Trump movement tried to make a stand. It failed by a massive margin.

CLEVELAND — Efforts to block Donald Trump’s nomination — hyped for months by proponents as a growing grass-roots movement among Republican activists attending this week’s convention — turned out to be a flop.

During key votes on Thursday evening, only 12 hard-core holdouts continued to resist Trump’s nomination when members of on the powerful 112-member Convention Rules Committee considered a proposal to prevent delegates from rejecting Trump.

Republican delegates and party leaders gathering in Cleveland for next week’s national convention praised Donald Trump’s selection of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, saying it would stabilize the ticket and calm social conservatives.

It adds significant government experience to Trump’s outsider campaign for the White House.

“Principled Conservative” … “Solid Grasp On Policy” … “A Home Run” … “Could Not Have Made A Better Choice”

The New Development Bank (NDB), a one-year-old, infrastructure-focused lender backed by emerging BRICS economies, said this week it would issue 3 billion yuan, or US$ 447.8 million, worth of bonds in China’s interbank market on July 18.

It is also the first time the multilateral bank, set up by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has issued bonds denominated in a currency of a member country.

The bond is a five-year green bond, which raises funds for projects that benefit the environment in ways such as improving energy efficiency and preventing pollution.

The bond yield will be decided on the day of issuance, according to the bank, which is headquartered in Shanghai. Analysts expect it to fall between 2.8 percent and 3.6 percent per annum.

Webmaster's Commentary:

I would imagine that these bonds, due to go on sale next Monday, will sell quite well.

The patience of the French people may be wearing thin as individuals known to Western intelligence, and armed with simple weapons, slip through the security net and kill innocent people, political experts told RT.

For a while Zimbabwe was one of the most promising and potentially bountiful countries in Africa and its people were for more amenable than South Africans to the south.

MugabeThere was a joke when I left then Rhodesia that the Zimbabwe ruins would be all that was left if Robert Mugabe ever assumed power. Well it came to pass and Mugabe has brought an agriculturally abundant, prosperous and formerly stable country to the brink of ruin.

It’s a far cry from the “liberation” that was promised when Mugabe assumed power in 1980.

Africa is facing a new and devastating colonial invasion driven by a determination to plunder the natural resources of Africa, especially its strategic energy and mineral resources. That’s the message from a damning new report from War On Want ‘The New Colonialism: Britain’sscramble for Africa’s energy and mineral resources’ that highlights the role of the British government in aiding and abetting the process.

Jacob Zuma is in talks to buy a $165 Million Dollar Presidential Jet, it was reported, just days after the South African President warned of growing frustration among the country's poorest over the government's failure to improve their lives.

The customised Boeing 777 plane seats 300 people and would cost $150 Million Dollars to buy and an additional $80 Million Dollars to be adapted to Mr Zuma's specifications. (total: $230 Million Dollars)

The Department of Defence, which oversees VIP transport, is reportedly considering spending an additional $28 Million Dollars on a second private plane for Kgalema Motlanthe, the deputy president.

Bush’s poodle subordinated British sovereignty – and precipitated a disaster.

Do we really need a 2.6 million word report on how Bush’s poodle, a.k.a. former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, allowed his country to be pulled into a conflict that claimed hundreds of British lives, thousands of American lives, and at least 150,000 Iraqi lives, while plunging the entire region into a maelstrom of terroristic chaos?

A good decade after being announced, the Chilcot report has finally been released, and what it shows is that the phrase “Bush’s poodle” is blatantly unfair to poodles: after all, even a poodle is known to have gone off its leash every once in a while – but not Tony.

Eager to hold the political “center,” Hillary Clinton has budged little on Bernie Sanders’s policy proposals beyond nice-sounding platitudes, a strategy that could lead to clashes at the Democratic convention, says Lawrence Davidson.

Hillary Clinton has pursued the presidency for almost a decade with a tenacious determination. She almost achieved the nomination in 2008 only to lose to Barack Obama. That led to an eight-year stifling of this ambition.

Finally, in the long run-up to the 2016 election, she was convinced the nomination was hers.

The much-edited Chilcot Report finally arrived and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has issued a pretty-sounding apology for his party’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. He called it the most serious foreign policy calamity of the last 60 years and “a stain on our party and country”.

It’s unfortunate that he dignifies the evil Iraq war conspiracy by suggesting it had anything to do with policy of the British people. It was a private venture, pledged in secret, by a Labour prime minister and his closest henchmen, and backed by the Cabinet.

First and foremost it was not so much a foreign policy disaster as a flat-out war crime for which Blair as chief perpetrator must be tried. And so must his Cabinet, who carry collective responsibility.

The controversial proposal would see development funds used for armies The plan, which would see the security forces of unsettled countries funded by the EU's development fund, has been sharply criticised after it was put forward by the European Commission last week. Delegate Reinhad Bütikofer blasted the EU for working on the project “clandestinely without any public debate.”

If Trump wants to put America first, he needs to start firing the Neoconservatives and their lackeys from the White House and putting them on trial for making Americans look really bad.

Rather than listening and learning and modifying their actions, the ruling elites stick to “more of the same.” This process clearly emblematized by the endless procession of Bushes and Clintons replacing each other in the positions of power.

When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades. The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth, so the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically.

snip: What did U.S. and NATO officials think — that people would simply remain where they were so that they could get blown to bits with the bombs that were being dropped on them, by the U.S. assassination program, or by the massive civil-war violence that came as a result of the U.S. and NATO regime-change operations?

People don’t ordinarily behave in that fashion. Most people prefer to live rather than die and will do anything they can to survive. That’s why those refugees fled to Europe— to escape the horrific consequences of interventionism by NATO and the U.S. national security state in the Middle East.

I wonder if deep down, those who are lamenting and groaning about the Brexit vote realize that: If there had been no U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, no regime change in Libya, no U.S. and NATO bombing and interventionism in Syria, there wouldn’t have been a massive refugee crisis in Europe and, almost certainly, a rejection of Brexit by a majority of British voters.

A political beacon is about to be extinguished unless he breaks with the doomed Labour Party and sets up on his own

Well I don’t know why I came here tonight
I got the feeling that something ain’t right,
I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair,
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs,
Clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am,
Stuck in the middle with you.
Yes I’m stuck in the middle with you,
And I’m wondering what it is I should do,
It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face,
Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the place,
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right…
— Lyrics from ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’

Brexit is a game-changing event. Now Euro-sceptics all over Europe has got fresh wind in their sails.

Few people expected the positive outcome of Brexit referendum. Among other doubters, I expected the UK government will borrow a trick from the Clinton collection, and proclaim the "Bremain" hath it.

The political establishment of both leading parties, the Tories and Labour, wished to remain in the cosy lap of the EC. This was the will of the Bank of England, and of the City of London; of the powerful media lords, of the creative minority of yuppies, of cosmopolitan intellectuals.

What you are seeing with the Brexit is the result of the Obama administrations pro-war, new Cold War policy.

With us to discuss the economic and political context of the Brexit is Michael Hudson. He is a research professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy. Also, he is an economics adviser to several governments.

Neither oil nor currency issues were discussed at the SASC hearing, where Lt. Gen. Waldhauser assured South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham that he would expand the so-called War on Terror in Africa and seek the authority to assassinate without presidential approval:

A vaccine for malaria has been a long-time dream for researchers, but it’s no easy feat. Now, a new study on our most advanced vaccine shows its efficacy not only wanes, but it can also make some kids get more bouts of malaria later in life. In a seven-year follow up of the Phase II trial of the RTS,S vaccine—the malaria vaccine that has been in development the longest—researchers found the vaccine significantly dropped in efficacy over time.

(Why you should care: because America's political influencers aren't alone in wearing out their welcome.)

part of article:
South Africa’s political community is brimming with stories about Indians’ unprecedented influence there, but Pratap Kumar Penumala isn’t celebrating. The Durban-based emeritus professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal is worried that the smell of scandal swirling around an India-born family could stir broader anti-Indian sentiment in the country that inspired Mahatma Gandhi’s politics a century ago.

The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”

Hillary Clinton has shown no real remorse over her support for neocon “regime changes,” aggressive wars and belligerence toward Russia, leaving the oft-obnoxious Donald Trump as the relative peace candidate, says John V. Walsh.

Let us hear from these heretics, among them William Greider, Glen Ford, John Pilger, Jean Bricmont, Stephen F. Cohen and William Blum. Their words are not to be construed as “endorsements,” but rather an acknowledgement of Trump’s anti-interventionist views, the impact those views are having and the alternative he poses to Hillary Clinton in the current electoral contest.

The United States is methodically setting the stage for a so-called “humanitarian” military intervention against the small northeast African nation of Eritrea, under legal pretexts much like those used to justify NATO’s war of regime change against Libya, in 2011. As in Libya, the U.S. has hijacked the United Nations human rights apparatus to claim a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) Eritrea’s citizens from alleged abuses by their own government. War and regime change are the intended result.

We are a group of concerned U.S. citizens currently visiting Russia with the goal of increasing understanding and reducing international tension and conflict. We are appalled by this call for direct U.S. aggression against Syria, and believe it points to the urgent need for open public debate on U.S. foreign policy.

Too quick to judgment? The Democratic Party establishment and the media now call Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee to face off Donald Trump in November. Though this is before the Democrats hold their convention and while Clinton is still short of pledged delegates.

Choosing to speak in San Diego, home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on a platform draped with 19 American flags and preceded by half an hour of military marching music, Hillary Clinton was certain of finding a friendly audience for her celebration of American “strength”, “values” and “exceptionalism”. Cheered on by a military audience, Hillary was already assuming the role to which she most ardently aspires: that of Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.

As usual, she goes for the military solution, ridiculing the notion of diplomacy.

Rebel forces in southern Sudan began using child soldiers long before seceding from Sudan in 2011. The United States, on the other hand, passed a law in 2008 that banned providing military assistance to nations that use child soldiers. The law was called the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, or CSPA, but after South Sudan’s independence, the White House issued annual waivers that kept aid flowing to the world’s newest nation despite its use of child soldiers. President Obama stated in 2012 that the waiver that year was in “the national interest of the United States.”

Webmaster's Commentary:

Someone in the press needs to have the "male attributes" to challenge her on this issue of those waivers, allowing South Sudan to conscript child soldiers.

Please: don't listen to what Clinton says in her campaign speeches; after all, it was President Obama in 2008, who said, publicly, that she would say ANYTHING in order to get elected.

Rather, look at the history of her actions at the State Department and as New York State Senator: she supported the disastrous war in Iraq; the assassination of Qaddafi in Libya; and created an absolute fiasco of the alleged "Reset" with Russia.

As Sherlock Holmes would say, “We are entering in deep waters, Watson”.

The executive leadership now faces the problem of how to deal with a traitor, who may be the Democratic Party nominee for US President. How do the executive leadership and intelligence agencies back a foreign spy for president, who has been deeply compromised and can be blackmailed? This may explain why the FBI, NSA, and CIA hesitate to press charges; hesitate to even seriously investigate, despite the obvious nature of her offenses. Most of all it explains why there is no indication of the identity of Secretary Clinton’s correspondents in the various reports so far available.

Even as Hillary Clinton closes in on the Democratic nomination, facts continue to emerge indicating that her sloppy email practices may have endangered secrets, including the identities of covert operatives, writes Peter Van Buren.

These are facts. You can look at the source documents yourself. This is not opinion, conjecture, or rumor. Hillary Clinton transmitted the names of American intelligence officials via her unclassified email.

From a series of Clinton emails, numerous names were redacted in the State Department releases with the classification code “B3 CIA PERS/ORG,” a highly specialized classification that means the information, if released, would violate the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 by exposing the names of CIA officials.

Matthews flat out states that there is a plan in place at MSNBC to announce Hillary as the clear winner, hours before anything is officially declared, to make people think they will be wasting their time by going out to vote for Bernie.

This is a stunning example of the dirty tricks that the mainstream media will play to further their preferred establishment candidate’s position in the race:

As Sherlock Holmes would say, “We are entering in deep waters, Watson”.

There are several lines of inquiry against Mme. Clinton:

(1) Did she work with, as yet unnamed, foreign governments and intelligence services to strengthen their positions and against the interest of the United States?

(2) Did she provide information on the operations and policy positions of various key US policymakers to competitors, adversaries or allies undermining the activities of military, intelligence and State Department officials?

(3) Did she seek to enhance her personal power within the US administration to push her aggressive policy of serial pre-emptive wars over and against veteran State Department and Pentagon officials who favored traditional diplomacy and less violent confrontation?

(4) Did she prepare a ‘covert team’, using foreign or dual national operative, to lay the groundwork for her bid for the presidency and her ultimate goal of supreme military and political power?

September 11th 2001. The day that will forever live in infamy as the day when the reset button was hit on over two centuries of American history and allowed for the new doctrines of preemptive war, the domestic police state and the codifying of torture into the law of the land. The real meaning as well as the cause of 9/11 continues to resonate and be debated throughout the alternative media and the blogosphere despite the sanctimonious reverence given to it by the corporate, state controlled mainstream media where those who dare to even suggest that it was blowback are shouted down by angry demagogues standing atop their electronic soapboxes. That one single day more than anything else has been used as the justification the rise of the new American fascist state and the illegal wars of aggression that feed the colossus that is the military industrial complex.

These days, as Europe is engaged in a behind the scenes fight with Turkey to put an end to the flow of illegal migrants along the “Turkish route”, European officials prefer to keep silent about yet another impressive wave of illegal migrants coming to the EU from Africa.

Monsanto has been trying to take over Africa’s cotton for decades with their patented, genetically modified (GM) seed. Not without irony, Burkina Faso is just one of the African countries that has been wary of any of Monsanto’s GM seed, adding to the credo, ‘better off dead, than GM fed,’ when it came to accepting U.S. food aid that was primarily genetically altered...

Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used weed killer. Some claim it is completely harmless, others say it is a serious health hazard for man and animals. A topical investigation into a controversial substance.

As the Syrian crisis drags on and hopes of a peaceful resolution or, at the very least, a return to relative normalcy in Libya seem very distant, Algeria should, by now, begin suspecting that it might soon find itself in the Anglo-American crosshairs. There is now rapidly growing evidence that Algeria is doing just that...

UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s embarrassing remarks about Nigeria drew harsh criticism Wednesday from Nigerian senators and President Muhammadu Buhari who said he would not want an apology but “something tangible.”

This is where it gets interesting. Guess who is the presiding High Court Judge that on 30 April 2016 gave judgment that the whole sordid affair needs to go to trial? That’s correct children – Judge Mabel Jansen. Although no date has been set it is not presumptive to assume that Judge Jansen would be the presiding judge in that trial as well.

Are you putting two and two together? The maths are quite simple. Kidi Amin is faced with the prospect of a judge presiding over a trial which he hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Seeing that she did not accede to his demands that the whole matter be dropped – and that he now has to go to trial – one can rightly assume that he views her as an enemy. And what better way of ridding oneself surreptitiously of an enemy than by having the enemy withdraw or be withdrawn due to scandal.

For a long time mining was seen as a dirty alternative to a more wholesome farming lifestyle. But some of the richest gold-mining potential in Africa is luring hundreds of thousands of Ivorians off the land and into the mines.

For years they were children at war, boys given rifles and training by al-Qaeda-backed militants and sent to the front lines of this country’s bloody conflict. Many had been kidnapped from schools and soccer fields and forced to fight. The United Nations pleaded for them to be removed from the battlefield. The United States denounced the Islamist militants for using children to plant bombs and carry out assassinations.

Looking back over Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy record, it’s clear that she is neither a progressive nor a liberal, but a proven warmonger whose record has contributed greatly to war, bloodshed and destruction in the Middle East and North Africa.

In 1993 a peace-keeping mission in Somalia went horribly wrong. Many people were killed or injured. Wounded US soldiers were surrounded by jeering armed mobs.

This happened two days before the UN security council was due to decide whether or not to send peace-keepers to Rwanda. With the support of Russia and the UK, America insisted on only a small, cheap peace-keeping effort. It would be limited to Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali, and there would be no seizing of weapons - only observing.

Chevron Nigeria Limited says its Okan offshore facility is currently shut-in and that it is assessing the situation, while resources have been deployed to respond to a resulting spill.

Nigerian Navy spokesperson, Commodore Chris Ezekobe, who also confirmed the incidenton Thursday, said that the attack occurred about 40 nautical miles from the Escravos terminal, around Warri in Delta State.

A group known as the Niger Delta Avengers has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Graham Peebles highlights the role of Ethiopian government policy in accentuating the effects of the drought, which is causing famine affecting up to 18 million people, and laments that anyone has to go hungry in a world which has enough to feed everyone.

The 10th largest cotton producer in the world is giving up on Monsanto's genetically modified Bt cotton. Burkina Faso, Africa's top cotton producer, has been having some serious problems with the quality of the cotton being produced from Monsanto's GM seed. The strands of cotton being produced are far too short, making them unworkable for spinning applications. The yarn produced from GM cotton is weaker and takes longer to spin. The entire region is now planning "tactical withdrawal" of Monsanto's transgenic cotton. The sub-par GM product is proving to be economically unviable.

A South African court has revised a 2009 decision to drop graft charges against President Jacob Zuma, saying he should again face a trial over a controversial arms deal in 1999.

“The decision... to discontinue the charges against Mr Zuma is irrational and should be reviewed and set aside,” Judge Aubrey Ledwaba ruled on Friday, adding, “Mr Zuma should face the charges as applied.”

The verdict allows prosecutors to re-open charges against Zuma in connection with a multi-billion dollar arms deal 17 years ago. The embattled leader has denied allegations of accepting bribes from international arms manufacturers at the time.

A defense contractor hired mercenaries from Africa for $16 a day to guard American bases in Iraq, with one of the company’s former directors saying no checks were made on whether those hired were former child soldiers.

The director of Aegis Defense Services between 2005 and 2015, said contractors recruited from countries such as Sierra Leone to reduce costs for the U.S. occupation in Iraq. He said none of the estimated 2,500 boys recruited from Sierra Leone were checked to see if they were former child soldiers who had been forced to fight in the country’s civil war.

Burkina Faso, Africa's top cotton producer and the sole West African nation to venture into biotech farming, is dropping genetically-modified (GM) cotton on quality grounds. The world's 10th largest cotton producer, with four of its 19 million people dependent on the "white gold", Burkina Faso earlier this month said it was giving up Monsanto's GM Bt cotton because it had proved uneconomical.

when it comes to a country as large as Russia, with its vast military capabilities, consolidated and wildly popular political leadership, and growing antagonism toward the West, the tools available to the Empire to undermine and destabilize are in some ways more limited.

Indeed, in the context of Russia, the popular mobilization pretext does not apply, and so that weapon in the imperial arsenal is blunted considerably. But there are other, equally potent (and equally dangerous) methods to achieve the desired effect.

Russia is the target of a multi-faceted, asymmetric campaign of destabilization that has employed economic, political, and psychological forms of warfare, each of which has been specifically designed to inflict maximum damage on the Kremlin. While the results of this multi-pronged assault have been mixed, and their ultimate effect being the subject of much debate, Moscow is, without a doubt, ground zero in a global assault against the BRICS nations.

Since November, state security forces have killed hundreds of protesters and arrested thousands in Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region. It’s the biggest political crisis to hit the country since the 2005 election but has barely registered internationally. And with the protests now in their fifth month, there is an almost complete information blackout.

In 1954, a single book destroyed the popular notion that children are innocent souls. In that book, a plane of such innocent souls crashes on a deserted island. There, in a paradise of coral and coconuts and wild pigs, the survivors soon revert to a state of nature.

Mosquitoes are once again in the news … and so are vaccines. Angola, Africa is the site of the latest “outbreak,” this time yellow fever. So far, at least 225 people have died, with over 1,600 reported cases. The outbreak is of particular concern as it first took hold in the nation’s capital of 6 million people, Luanda, in December of last year.

Yellow fever – similar to Zika, chikunguya and dengue – is carried by the now globally dreaded Aedes aegypti mosquito. Unlike the knowingly inflated numbers of the mass hysteria that surrounded Zika, yellow fever has long been recognized as a source of mass casualties in the 40+ countries where it has appeared, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths annually.

While the illness and deaths unfolding across Angola are horrific for those currently in yellow fever’s path, it is notable that the mainstream media is pushing the apparently much larger question: Could yellow fever return to the USA? ...

The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has just released the report For your own good!, which outlines the GMO industry’s expansion across Africa. The report focusses on non-commercial traditional crops, such as cassava, sorghum, sweet potato, pigeon pea, cowpea, banana and rice, which corporations are attempting to genetically modify and roll out under the guise of philanthropy.

More than 100 groups representing over 5 million Nigerians, comprising of farmers, faith-based organisations, civil society groups, students and local community groups, are vehemently opposing Monsanto’s attempts

She is back! The daughter of Muammar Gaddafi will lead the resistance against NATO and the other Libyan terrorists. Ayesha stated that she is now the leader of the resistance and she is about to create a new secret government.

The Italian government has quietly begun allowing armed American drones to fly out from its soil at the Sigonella station (a NATO and U.S. naval air-base) near Catania in Sicily, Italy for military operations against (allegedly) the Islamic State in Libya and across North Africa. This is a breakthrough for Washington, as after more than a year of negotiations, Italy backed down and surrendered...

More than 400,000 white South Africans are thought to live in poverty. The country's population is about 50 million. Those living in squalid conditions are forced to survive on around £28.99 a month.

The squatter camp in Munsieville, near Johannesburg, is one of 80 across South Africa. It is built on the site of an old dumping ground and is home to around 300 people, of which a quarter are children.

There is no electricity, no running water apart from a couple of standpipes, no secure structures and little food. Houses are typically built with bare earth floors, but frequent floods wash away the topsoil and leave decades-old waste exposed.

Hospitals refuse residents care and those living at the camp are regularly rebuffed by potential employers at job interviews.

Reporters from the Swedish weekly newspaper Nya Tider (New Times) have traveled to South Africa to investigate whether the "Rainbow Nation" is the success story that Swedish establishment media sometimes say – as far as they are at all interested in the land that has been in the media focal point until 1994. We met with politicians, farmers and victims. Thousands of farmers have been murdered in the Rainbow Nation, and the fear is always present.

In yet another example of the growing influence and reputation of Russia on the international stage, particularly when it comes to the question of “fighting terrorism,” Algeria will soon receive 40 MI-28 attack helicopters from Russia...

Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, nearly a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton aide who gained notoriety when he testified against Monica Lewinsky. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part:

Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).

“A new report from the UN human rights office is accusing the US-backed government of South Sudan” of “encourag[ing] troops and their militia allies to loot private property and rape women” in lieu of pay.

The UN reported “that civilians suspected of supporting the opposition were burned alive or hacked to pieces by troops, with torture and forced displacement common.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Rape, torture, looting and forced displacement, readers, is what is being done in your name, and with your tax dollars. Doesn't it make you proud to be an American?!?!?

And here is the reason why it is happening; as reported at en.wikipedia.org:

Concern is growing in Zimbabwe after a 92 year-old man was reported missing after claiming on Monday he was traveling to India. The missing person’s name: Robert Mugabe.

The veteran Zimbabwean leader, who has been in power for 36 years and is the world’s oldest serving head of state, was reported to have left the country on Monday to attend the World Culture Festival in New Delhi, which kicks off in the Indian capital on Friday.

Since then, however, his whereabouts have become something of a mystery. Mugabe canceled his visit to the festival on Wednesday, with his spokesman George Charamba citing “substantial inadequacies in protocol and security arrangements” and saying that Mugabe would return home in “a couple of days.”

In 2009, the South African government announced a major energy plan to construct two new coal-fired power stations. The project, which aimed at building the world’s largest coal plants, came under intense criticism by various governments and climate activists, who saw it as a disastrous blow to the fight against climate change.

Yet newly released emails from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State, reveal that she acted in support of a World Bank loan for the construction of one of the plants.

This missing e-mail from February 16, 2013 only exists in the original leak and states that French and Libyan intelligence agencies had evidence that the In Amenas and Benghazi attacks were funded by “Sunni Islamists in Saudi Arabia.”

This week, the US government used drones and airstrikes to fire missiles and drop bombs in a country that they aren’t at war with, killing at least 150 people. This act of aggression took place in Somalia, where the US military regularly stages drone strikes and other attacks, despite the fact that they have not declared war on the country. The government claims that every single one of the victims were “militants” or terrorists; however, they have not revealed the identities of the victims and have not provided any evidence to support their claims...

Attacks on lawful governments of this type are today called “color revolutions”—rose (Georgia), orange (Ukraine), and pink (Kyrgyzstan). They overthrew and murdered Muammar Qaddafi in Libya more than three years ago, reducing the country to violent chaos that continues today.

They overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in February 2014, installing a government laced with the Bandera Nazis and cabinet
appointments made in Washington, in preparation for triggering a war with Russia.

The underlying method of the color revolutions is the mass mobilization of mostly well-meaning people, with a false promise—and false concept—of democracy. It is not new.

The Obama administration will disclose how many people have been killed by U.S. drones and counterterrorism strikes since 2009, the White House said Monday, lifting one element of secrecy shrouding the controversial counterterrorism program.

Both combatants and civilians the U.S. believes have died in strikes from the skies will be included in the report, which covers the period since President Barack Obama took office. It won’t cover major fighting zones like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, but will focus on the shadowy regime of strikes against extremist targets in other regions such as North Africa.

Webmaster's Commentary:

IF this report will not cover "...cover major fighting zones like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan..." it is so seriously compromised as to not believed at all.

And Obama really believes that this will lend credibility to his program of extrajudicial assassinations?!?

I would love to see the logic, at the White House, which actually led to this conclusion.

It has long appeared to me that the real point of the drone bombings is to create more terrorists to justify unending and eternal US warfare on parts of the world containing resources the US government wishes to expropriate for American corporations.

This may well be a very cynical assessment; but just because it is cynical makes this no less potentially true.

President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria declined business overtures from former Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Tony Blair, an extract from the explosive new biography by investigative journalist, Tom Bower has revealed.

British Defense Minister Michael Fallon today announced that his nation will be sending a team of ground troops to Tunisia to join that nation’s Libyan border defense operations, aiming to keep ISIS from infiltrating across the border.

The first deployment will be only 20 troops, nominally “trainers,” but Fallon talked up the need to keep ISIS out of Tunisia and hinted that this might just be the first step, adding that Britain is also “urgently” helping to try to form a new unity government in Libya.

Fallon also suggested that once there was a new government in place in Libya, Britain would be open to more expansive military action there, at the invitation of this new faction they are working to install.

Webmaster's Commentary:

Oh, terrific: after the US epic fail in Libya, now the UK's military wants to have a "go" at installing a western-centric government there, a "reconquista", if you will.

Good luck with that!!

And a small memo to British Defense Minister Michael Fallon: those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, and it appears, sir, that you are moving quite rapidly in that direction right now.

Remember how the American military involvement with Vietnam started?!? By the embedding of US "advisors" with South Vietnamese troops.

And you do recall just how that war ended for the US?!? The word "horrifically" just doesn't even begin cover it.

I know this announcement calls for just a handful of troops, so that you can "sell" this successfully back home in the UK. But trust me; ultimately, this war for the resources of Africa, which the US and UK both covet, will involve thousands of UK (and probably US) troops, with much blood and money spent.

But at the end of the day, as happened in Vietnam, you may well be no less able to control the geopolitical outcome here that was the US able to do in Vietnam.

I would strongly urge you and caution you, please, to reconsider this deployment; because when a country is fighting a war, in order to win, it has to be on the right side of history.

This is something no military or civilian leader of any country should ever, ever forget.

The Pentagon is prepared to approve a new plan to redeploy ground troops already in Nigeria to the front lines of that nation’s war against Boko Haram, saying they will be positioned close to fighting but in a purely “non-combat role.”

The troops were originally sent to Nigeria for “training” of that nation’s military for the war on terror, and the redeployment would have them in “advisory” roles, putting them right in the middle of the action.

The US has regularly couched ground deployments around the world as “non-combat” roles, and stuck to that official label even after those troops start getting involved in direct combat on a regular basis. The shift closer to the front line suggests Nigeria is simply following this tactic.

Webmaster's Commentary:

We know that the Pentagon spokespeople who are assuring the US that these "advisors" in Nigeria will be in purely "non-combat" rolls are lying.

Why?!? Because they open their mouths..... and words come out of them.

Yes, oil prices are depressed right now; but they will not stay depressed forever (particularly if any rather spectacular war breaks out). The US wants to be in complete control of Nigerian oil, and the money in which that oil is sold.
That's why we are in Nigeria, folks.

Commentators grossly oversimplify when they reduce the revolt to incoherent expressions of ‘anger’.

The presidential elections of 2016 have several unique characteristics that defy common wisdom about political practices in 21st century America.

Clearly the established political machinery – party elites and their corporate backers -have (in part) lost control of the nomination process and confront ‘unwanted’ candidates who are campaigning with programs and pronouncements that polarize the electorate.

But there are other more specific factors, which have energized the electorate and speak to recent US history. These portend and reflect a realignment of US politics.

In this essay, we will outline these changes and their larger consequences for the future of American politics.

We will examine how these factors affect each of the two major parties.

Several former and current officials of the Government of Liberia have been indicted to face prosecution on multiple criminal charges. At least one of the several defendants is spending the night at the Monrovia Central Prison in Monrovia while the court pursues the others. Former Deputy Managing Director for Operations at the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company (LPRC) was committed to the prison following a writ of arrest issued by Criminal Court C based on a complaint from the anti-graft Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission of Liberia.

The Court in its writ of arrest spotted by FrontPageAfrica at Criminal court C named some of the defendants as former Commerce Minister Miatta Beyslow, Director at Commerce, Steve Flahn-Paye and Aaron Whiegar, amongst others.

Algeria has reinforced its military presence on the borderline with Libya. It is believed that some 50,000 troops have been deployed along the 1,000 km borderline.1 Algeria supports the UN-led political process in this war-thorn country, and is closely working with the Libyan authorities to maintain security on both sides of the border...

An American bombing raid in Libya on Friday signaled a potentially deepening involvement in the latest front of the U.S. military campaign against the Islamic State—and underscored the expansion of U.S. airstrikes as a tool to combat Islamist terror groups around the globe.

U.S. aircraft are now targeting jihadists in seven countries from North Africa to Afghanistan. And ISIS militants aren’t the only extremists in the crosshairs of American warplanes and drones. The U.S. is also still hunting al-Qaeda operatives and Taliban fighters where these jihadists pose security threats to U.S. allies and interests.

But the civilian toll in these attacks can be high, analysts and monitoring groups say. A United Nations report last year alleged that U.S. drone strikes in Yemen had killed more civilians than al-Qaeda operatives. In September, an American warplane fired on a charity hospital in northern Afghanistan, killing 30 patients and staff and wounding dozens more.

Webmaster's Commentary:

These extrajudicial assassinations have absolutely no standing in American law, no matter the mounds of false "justifications" President Obama's attorneys have dug up with which to justify the practice.

They are not only morally wrong; they are also a weapon which radicalizes more young men, leading to a state of perpetual war, which, of course, the US military/industrial complex just loves.

If the rebels grasp the chance and enter serious negotiations for a coalition government, peace is possible.

The Russians accepted the US proposal to cease fire in Syria (or rather to end hostilities). They had made a similar proposal a few weeks ago, so this is in line with their thinking. Russians have made huge successes in Syria; they achieved an astonishing and unexpected victory with very few losses.

It was a reputational victory it was as well as a military one. Russia entered the Syrian war at a low point internationally.

Libyan army liberates Benghazi city from jihadist cutthroats:” Nureddin Sabir reports that the Libyan National Army, affiliated to the internationally-recognised Libyan government, has liberated all the positions held by Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists in Benghazi.

Paul Craig Roberts blogs on the recent release of an updated version of the book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by the former "hit man" John Perkins.

PCR:
Perkins shows that despite his revelations, the situation is worse than ever and has spread into the West itself. The populations of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the United States itself are now being looted by Hit Man activity.

Perkins’ book shows that the US is “exceptional” only in the unbridled violence it applies to others who get in its way. One of the new chapters tells the story of France-Albert Rene, president of Seychelles, who threatened to reveal the illegal and inhumane eviction of the residents of Diego Garcia by Britain and Washington so that the island could be converted into an air base from which Washington could bomb noncompliant countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Washington sent in a team of jackels to murder the president of Seychelles, but the assassins were foiled. All but one were captured, tried and sentenced to execution or prison, but a multi-million dollar bribe to Rene freed them. Rene got the message and became compliant.

Graham Peebles argues that the recent huge demonstrations in Ethiopia’s Oromia and Gondar regions could be the green shoots of a popular movement that would eventually depose the country’s quarter-century one-party dictatorship.

Reading mainstream media news, analyses, and opinion pieces about this war is completely useless, as everything is either uninformed and clueless gibberish or propaganda and deception.

I wrote this text over several days and every time I sat down again to continue there came another headline to my mind. The first headline was “Nobody said, that it will be easy,” the second “Waiting for the Turkey-Russia showdown,” the third “Playing the terrorism game,” the fourth “Everything is better than war.”

In the end I settled for the header “The empire doesn’t retreat or compromise.”

This statement stands the test of time, it has been proven throughout human history, and there is only one single exemption, only one short period where retreat and compromise are a possibility. This short period is the time when the empire is in terminal decline and in the process of collapsing.

The South African Reserve Bank said rand notes found on a cargo plane impounded in Zimbabwe this week after a dead body was discovered on board should be returned home.

“The aircraft currently detained at Harare Airport is carrying a consignment of South African banknotes that was produced overseas as part of the SARB’s annual production plan,” the Pretoria-based central bank said in a statement on its websitehttps://www.resbank.co.za/Publications/Detail-Item-View/Pages/Publicat... on Tuesday. The bank is working with authorities to ensure the shipment will be released and delivered to South Africa, according to the statement.

Washington and its allies are not interested in peace. They want regime change – by hook or by crook.

An end to the Syrian conflict is desperately needed. But the latest plan for a cessation of violence is unlikely to take hold, as the deal struck by international powers is based on fundamentally opposing premises.

In short, Washington and its allies want regime change, while Russia and Iran insist that President Bashar Al-Assad and his government are the legitimate ruling authorities in Syria. All sides are mandated by UN resolutions to respect the sovereign will of the Syrian people – to determine the political future of their country.

If and when Aleppo and the whole Aleppo district will be taken by the Syrian army, we would be able to congratulate Putin and Assad – and Syrian people – with a great victory.

The Russians raise alarms that a Turkish invasion into Syria is imminent. Russian media is foaming at the mouth about the perfidious Turks; a veritable Two Minutes Hate ritual (vide Orwell) on the state-managed TV channels being repeated a few times a day. The idea is to scare Turks stiff so they will not move while the operation in the North lasts. On the other side, the Russian opposition draws frightful scenarios of Janissaries slaughtering the Russian boys on the Syrian terrain. The Turkish media also tries to instil fear in the Russkies by saying what they can do.

The presidential candidates’ irresponsible remarks about Iran - as though it is a politically convenient football to be kicked around...

After watching both the Republican and Democratic debates on TV, I intend to exclude two main categories from my principle concerns in the upcoming presidential elections that will determine who will replace President Obama next year: one is the entire roster of the Republican Party, and the other, anything other than the foreign policy issues; the main area of my personal interest.

I am disregarding the entire Republican roster because I don’t think any Republican has a chance to beat Ms. Clinton in the general elections, at least this time around.